the gas tank took twenty-five minutes.
At one point, Biden, who had been
fingering a rosary, turned to Mullen, the
Joint Chiefs chairman. 'We should all
go to Mass tonight," he said.
The helicopters landed back in Jalala-
bad around 3 A.M.; McRaven and the
C.I.A. station chief met the team on the
tarmac. A pair of SEALs unloaded the
body bag and unzipped it so that McRa-
ven and the C.I.A. officer could see bin
Laden's corpse with their own eyes. Pho-
tographs were taken of bin Laden's face
and then of his outstretched body. Bin
Laden was believed to be about six feet
four, but no one had a tape measure to
confirm the body's length. So one SEAL,
who was six feet tall, lay beside the
corpse: it measured rougWy four inches
longer than the American. Minutes later,
McRaven appeared on the teleconfer-
ence screen in the Situation Room and
confirmed that bin Laden's body was in
the bag. The corpse was sent to Bagram.
All along, the SEALs had planned
to dump bin Laden's corpse into the
sea-a blunt way of ending the bin
Laden myth. They had successfully
pulled off a similar scheme before. Dur-
ing a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside So-
malia in September, 2009, SEALs had
killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of
East Africa's top Al
eda leaders;
Nabhan's corpse was then flown to a
ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper
Muslim rites, and thrown overboard.
Before taking that step for bin Laden,
however, John Brennan made a call.
Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station
chiefin Riyadh, phoned a former coun-
terpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan
told the man what had occurred in Ab-
bottabad and informed him of the plan
to deposit bin Laden's remains at sea.
As Brennan knew, bin Laden's relatives
were still a prominent family in the
Kingdom, and Osama had once been a
Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi govern-
ment have any interest in taking the
body? "Your plan sounds like a good
one," the Saudi replied.
At dawn, bin Laden was loaded into
the belly of a flip-wing V-22 Osprey,
accompanied by a JSOC liaison officer
and a security detail of military police.
The Osprey flew south, destined for the
deck of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson-a
thousand -foot-long nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier sailing in the Arabian
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8, 2011
Sea, off the Pakistani coast. The Amer-
icans, yet again, were about to traverse
Pakistani airspace without permission.
Some officials worried that the Paki-
stanis, stung by the humiliation of the
unilateral raid in Abbottabad, might re-
strict the Osprey's access. The airplane
ultimately landed on the Vinson with-
out incident.
Bin Laden's body was washed,
wrapped in a white burial shroud,
weighted, and then slipped inside a bag.
The process was done "in strict confor-
mance with Islamic precepts and prac-
tices," Brennan later told reporters. The
JSOC liaison, the military-police contin-
gen t, and several sailors placed the
shrouded body on an open-air elevator,
and rode down with it to the lower level,
which functions as a hangar for air-
planes. From a height ofbetween twenty
and twenty-five feet above the waves,
they heaved the corpse into the water.
Back in Abbottabad, residents of
Bilal Town and dozens of journalists
converged on bin Laden's compound,
and the morning light clarified some of
the confusion from the previous night.
Black soot from the detonated Black
Hawk charred the wall of the animal
pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall.
I t was clear that a military raid had taken
place there. "I'm glad no one was hurt in
the crash, but, on the other hand, I'm
sort of glad we left the helicopter there,"
the special-operations officer said. "It
quiets the conspiracy mongers out there
and instantly lends credibility. You be-
lieve everything else instantly, because
there's a helicopter sitting there."
A fter the raid, Pakistan's political
leadership engaged in frantic dam-
age control. In the Washington Post,
President Asif AIi Zardari wrote that
bin Laden "was not anywhere we had
anticipated he would be, but now he
is gone," adding that "a decade of co-
operation and partnership between the
United States and Pakistan led up to
the elimination of Osama bin Laden."
Pakistani military officials reacted
more cynically. They arrested at least five
Pakistanis for helping the C.I.A., in-
cluding the physician who ran the im-
munization drive in Abbottabad. And
several Pakistani media outlets, includ-
ing the Nation-a jingoistic English-
language newspaper that is considered a
mouthpiece for Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, or I.S.I.-published
what they claimed was the name of the
C.I.A.'s station chief in Islamabad.
(Shireen Mazari, a former editor of the
Nation, once told me, "Our interests and
the Americans' interests don't coincide.")
The published name was incorrect, and
the C.I.A. officer opted to stay.
The proximity of bin Laden's house
to the Pakistan Military Academy raised
the possibility that the military, or the
I.S.I., had helped protect bin Laden.
How could AI
edà s chieflive so close
to the academy without at least some
officers knowing about it? Suspicion
grew after the Times reported that at
least one cell phone recovered from bin
Laden's house contained contacts for
senior militants belonging to Harakat-
ul-Mujahideen, a jihadi group that has
had close ties to the I.S.I. Although
American officials have stated that Pa-
kistani officials must have helped bin
Laden hide in Abbottabad, definitive
evidence has not yet been presented.
Bin Laden's death provided the
White House with the symbolic victory
it needed to begin phasing troops out of
Mghanistan. Seven weeks later, Obama
announced a timetable for withdrawal.
Even so, U.S. counterterrorism activi-
ties inside Pakistan-that is, covert op-
erations conducted by the C.I.A. and
JSOC-are not expected to diminish
anytime soon. Since May 2nd, there
have been more than twenty drone
strikes in North and South Waziristan,
including one that allegedly killed Ilyas
Kashmiri, a top AI
eda leader, while
he was sipping tea in an apple orchard.
The success of the bin Laden raid has
sparked a conversation inside military
and intelligence circles: .Axe there other
terrorists worth the risk of another heli-
copter assault in a Pakistani city? "There
are people out there that, if we could find
them, we would go after them," Cart-
wright told me. He mentioned Ayman
al- Zawahiri, the new leader of AI
eda,